Understand campaign unsubscribes and suppressions

Smart Campaigns include unsubscribe, preference, and suppression behavior so customer emails stay respectful and safer to send.

This article explains what happens when a customer opts out, why some recipients are skipped, and how campaign email categories work.

Campaign emails are optional emails

Smart Campaigns are for optional customer communication, such as promos, newsletters, review requests, win-back messages, and reminders.

They are separate from transactional emails.

Transactional emails include booking confirmations, booking updates, payment receipts, waiver links, refund notices, portal access codes, and other messages needed to run the booking or account.

A marketing unsubscribe should not block those transactional emails.

Email preference categories

Customers can manage optional email categories instead of using one all-or-nothing unsubscribe.

The categories are:

• Newsletters
• Promos and sales
• General marketing
• Review requests
• Optional reminders

Customers can change these from a campaign preferences link or from the customer portal settings page.

What the unsubscribe link does

Each campaign email includes an unsubscribe link.

When a customer clicks it, BouncePlatform verifies the signed link and opts that email address out of the campaign category.

For example:

• A promo unsubscribe stops future promo and sales campaigns.
• An optional reminder unsubscribe stops non-essential reminder emails.
• A review request unsubscribe stops optional review request campaigns.

It does not unsubscribe the customer from every email the business sends.

What the preferences link does

The preferences link opens a page where the customer can manage all optional categories.

This is useful when a customer wants newsletters but not promos, or reminders but not review requests.

Customers can also manage the same categories from the customer portal.

Suppressions are different from preferences

Preferences are customer choices.

Suppressions are deliverability protections.

An email address can be suppressed after a hard bounce, spam complaint, invalid address event, or manual admin action. Suppressed addresses are skipped even if the customer did not use an unsubscribe link.

Owners and admins can review the suppression list from Smart Campaigns.

Why a recipient may be skipped

A prepared campaign can skip a recipient for several reasons:

• missing email address
• duplicate email address
• unsubscribed from the campaign category
• suppressed after a bounce
• suppressed after a spam complaint
• suppressed because the address is invalid
• manually removed before send

Skipped recipients are kept in the campaign history so your team can see why they did not receive the email.

Best practices

• Choose the campaign category carefully before preparing recipients.
• Do not use Smart Campaigns for required booking or payment notices.
• Keep preferences and unsubscribe links in the message.
• Review skipped recipients before sending a large campaign.
• Manually suppress an address if a customer asks your team not to email them again.